Paul Miller

In the race for efficiency, modernity, and profit, we risk forgetting the needs, value, and importance of our human workforce.

Not too long ago, executives from manufacturing and related industries would not consider running their internet of things (IoT) initiatives from a cloud. Now? It’s hard to find one who doesn’t enthusiastically embrace some role for the public cloud. Makers of industrial IoT (IIoT) software platforms have undergone a similar change of heart, pivoting from […]

Augmented reality (AR) and the internet of things (IoT) — in principle, these two hot technologies are a great match, with data streaming from IoT-connected machines to be used by AR-wielding engineers on the factory floor. My latest report, “Combine Augmented And Mixed Reality With IoT To Deliver Insight At The Point Of Need,” began […]

My colleague Michele Pelino and I published “The Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms, Q4 2019” recently, and we’ll be discussing the findings in more detail in a webinar on January 30. It’s a complex space, where traditional industrial conglomerates, established enterprise software giants, networking and telecom providers, hyperscale cloud providers, global systems integrators, professional […]

Michele Pelino and I have been digging into Forrester Analytics’ Technographics® data, looking at big opportunities for the internet of things (IoT) — and identifying some of the consistent stumbling blocks to adoption. Michele and Frank Gillett have already done some great work here, updating documents such as “Internet-Of-Things Heat Maps For Operational Excellence, 2019” […]

The explosion of data in the IoT era has machinery designers taking a new look at how they use digital twins. Principal Analyst Paul Miller examines the trend.

Rolls-Royce began shifting its business model away from selling expensive metal, plastic, and carbon-fiber products (jet engines) toward delivering the service of miles flown way back in 1962. Now, with TotalCare, the company earns more than half of its revenues from delivery of a service, not sale of a product. Rolls-Royce is not alone. Its […]

I’ve written a lot about the ways in which traditional product makers are being transformed by digital. In “From Grease To Code: Industrial Giants Must Bet Their Futures On Software,” for example, I explored ways in which industrial firms are having to reinvent themselves as they augment a hundred years of experience making physical products […]

Why are IoT + blockchain success stories still so hard to find?

If you believe the stereotypes, then the worlds of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) are very different. In one, ranks of commoditized beige boxes hold institutional memory, critical intellectual property, and the bosses’ email: The data center is everything. In the other, proprietary, expensive, and arcane electromechanical monsters lurk next to the production […]

Back in August of last year, I asked for good examples of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality, and mixed reality (MR), all together known as extended reality. Unsurprisingly, I saw plenty of examples of the type my original post complained about: visually stunning but almost entirely useless for anything other than showing off. Then there […]

Koninklijke Philips has come a long way since the Philips family began making light bulbs in the Dutch city of Eindhoven in 1891. Today the company focuses on healthcare, but it wants to do more than just build and sell medical products. The Financial Times recently quoted Philips CEO Frans van Houten: “In the future, […]

The edge, and edge computing, figure prominently in a lot of internet of things (IoT) discussions right now. But where — and what — the edge is very quickly gets complicated. Telecom operators understand the edge of their network. Sellers of servers and gateways know what they’d like their customers to fill the edge with. Beneficiaries of […]

Africa is home to 20% of our planet’s land and 16% of its people, but none of the hyperscale public clouds run from data centers there — yet. Microsoft will offer Azure from data centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg later this year, and Amazon recently announced plans to follow suit with an Amazon Web Services […]

There’s a recurring assumption in discussions about internet of things (IoT) platforms: The platform providers make their money by mining insights from data loaded into their platform. They sell those insights back to the customer who put the data there in the first place and will also sell them to anyone else who can pay. […]

Multicloud is a real and increasingly strategic customer choice rather than an accident of poor or nonexistent planning. We all know that; I’ve written about it before. Vendors of cloud tools and solutions are clearly aware of the multicloud trend as well and are moving to position themselves to best advantage. But there’s a problem: For too […]